No, you simply cannot pull your gaze away as all this
conspicuous wealth inches back and forth, back and forth, trying to
be smaller than it is, trying not to crush the late-model sedan in
front, the pickup truck behind.

Finally, amazingly, the Hummer nestles in, albeit a couple feet
from the curb, just outside the sushi bar, next door to the organic
clothing boutique. That's where she'd headed in her big yellow
Hummer, for green duds.

Across the street, Don Kaski shakes his head, runs a hand
through a newly shorn buzz cut and wonders at it all.

But beneath the boutiques and the galleries, behind the
restaurants and the condos, the town - that is to say the community
- of Whitefish persists.

Kaski's close-cropped hair proves it.

He's just stepped out of a doorway at 420 E. Second St., where
he got buzzed at the Clip Joint. That's a downtown barbershop, been
here since 1947, specializing in the crew cut, the flat-top, the
taper, the high-and-tight, among others. They'll also trim your
eyebrows, your ears, the back of your neck, all the hairy head
parts.

There are no glossy coffee table books here to highlight the
latest do, no shelves of conditioner, no racks of gels and
mousse.

And, most importantly, there are no appointments, which makes
all the difference in the world. Here, you must wait, and in the
waiting you must make time to find the Whitefish that was, and,
fortunately, still is.

"You hear it all day," said Melissa Franklin, who bought this
business 10 years ago, the third owner of what started 60 years ago
as Herb's Barber Shop. "People talk about it. There's a lot of
frustration and disillusionment and unhappiness about the direction
Whitefish is going."

At the moment, it's going back and forth again, back and forth,
as the bright yellow Hummer tries to get back out onto the
street.

Franklin's seen that sort of back and forth before, "and it's
kind of tearing the community up a little bit."

Inside the cramped Clip Joint are a half dozen wooden chairs,
salvaged from the historic Whitefish Central School after voters
approved a recent remodel there. The chairs replaced the tired old
Clip Joint couches, because, as Colene Metzker said, "I got tired
of fishing little old men out of those cushions."

Metzker cuts customers in the shop's south chair, while Franklin
clips in the north.

They face the row of antique wooden seats, so many familiar bits
of history full, this morning, of much bigger bits of history,
old-time locals who are quick to tell you what's what, whether you
ask for it or not.

Peter, who grew up in Whitefish before leaving to "make my way
in the world," was first buzzed in this barbershop as a boy, six
decades back. He then spent a career as a real estate developer,
building up other ski towns, and he knows a thing or two about
speedy change in the lazy rural West.

The new ownership at nearby Big Mountain ski area - recently
renamed Whitefish Mountain Resort - has it all wrong, Peter
says.

They forced the resort's founders out of ownership, replaced
parking lots with real estate, even changed the mountain's
name.

"The one thing you don't mess with is you don't change
tradition," Peter said. "You don't try to remake a place that way
just because you can afford to buy it. It'd be like a bunch of PETA
people coming here and trying to shut down deer hunting. I mean,
what are they going to do, change the name of Glacier National Park
when the glaciers are gone?"

Peter isn't exactly poor, doesn't exactly resent the wealth that
has so changed the face of his hometown.

"Some people with money are really nice," he said. "They've done
a heck of a lot of nice things for Whitefish. Built the playhouse,
and the library. But some of this arrogance, it's just amazing.
Just because you can buy it doesn't mean you own it."

Franklin knows about that. Last winter, a seasonal second-home
owner in town for the holidays showed up for a haircut in his
full-body velour jogging suit. And he didn't want to wait.

"So he pulls out this wad of fifties and hundreds and tries to
buy the customer out of my chair," Franklin said. "It wasn't like
he was in any particular hurry. He didn't have to get back to work.
I mean, he was wearing a velour jogging suit.

"He just didn't want to wait," she said, "and so he figured he
could buy a cut in line."

Franklin kept quiet, let her customer handle it. "He told him he
was a working man, and could pay for his own haircut, thank you
very much, and that since he'd waited his turn, he was going to
take his turn."

The jogging suit left in a huff, she said, but returned not long
after to do what people do here - wait. Seems he went down to the
coffee shop to complain about the shop, but everyone told him to go
back, because it was the best cut in town.

"But you know," Franklin said, "that was just one guy. Most of
the new people are great. They're a lot like the old-timers. They
just come in to visit and get a haircut."

The visiting, in fact, is what it's all about. You hear about
garden tomatoes and grandchildren and fishing holes. You hear from
6-year-olds and 66-year-olds and everyone in between. You hear
about neighbors and news.

"You can learn more about what's going on in the world in this
barbershop than anywhere else," Peter says. "Especially CNN. When
it comes to news, CNN's got nothing on this barbershop."

"You hear about people's lives in the barber chair," Franklin
agreed. "Sometimes, you get too much information."

A sign on the wall advertises a haircut for $10, a haircut with
a therapy session for $75.

"I don't know what it is about barbers and bartenders," Franklin
said. "I've been both, and people just want to vent the crud in
their lives to you."

Today, though, Franklin has a sob story of her own for the
customers. Seems the barber police want her striped pole.

Thing is, Franklin trained under three master barbers, even
managed a big barbershop down in California for a while. She knows
all the clipper cuts, the butch and the Ivy League and that
high-and-tight. And for a decade, she's operated here in Whitefish
as a barbershop.

But her license says "cosmetologist," not "barber," and the
Montana Board of Barbers and Cosmetologists (yes, there really is
such a thing) says her barber pole must go (yes, they really do
worry themselves about such things).

And so today the talk in the shop is the shop itself. "Absurd,"
is a word that pops up pretty often. So is "ridiculous." The barber
cops are, Ron says, "splitting hairs." The room groans.

"I've been doing barber cuts for 15 years," Franklin said. "We
do all the clipper cuts. They need to go beyond the pole."

"It gets to this," 69-year-old Rich says. "How far do we let
people go to control our lives and our businesses? These are small
people with small jobs and too much time on their hands. We should
just tell them to leave us the hell alone."

Franklin asked if she could just take the barbering test, but
the board said no, she'd have to go through the whole barbering
school, despite her years of experience. Problem is, there's no
such school in Montana.

And so, for the first time in 60 years, there may be no barber
pole at 420 E. Second St. And no painted pole in the window. And no
tiny wooden pole on the wall, advertising shave and a haircut "$.05
cents," tooth pulling "$.02 cents." And no plastic spray bottles
designed to look like poles. The barber police want it all
gone.

Unless.

Colene Metzker and Ron Olson can't get the job
done, what with all the laughter and banter tossing around the Clip
Joint. Part of the reason locals come here is the haircut, but
another part is the neighborliness while they wait their
turn.MICHAEL JAMISON/Missoulian

Whitefish is still a small town, you see, small
enough that a barber, or a cosmetologist or whatever, can call up a
state senator at home and ask for his help. Last-minute
intervention by Sen. Dan Weinberg, D-Whitefish, has bought Franklin
a hearing before the barbering board this fall. She calls it her
"stay of execution," and it's big news here across from the sushi
joint.

"That pole's a piece of history," Franklin said. "It's one of
the last signs of old Whitefish that still exists downtown."

Already, the barber police have made her change the pole's color
- from red, white and blue to red and white - but to take it down,
she said, "would be so sad for downtown."

It is, in many ways, a sign of the times in this changing town,
where everyone except the newest of newcomers still call Big
Mountain by "its proper name," as Rich says.

But times are changing, worries Peter, who's waited 45 very
happy minutes for a 10-minute trim. "These days," he said, "you get
caught taking a leak out back of Casey's Bar and they put your name
in the paper. Hell, I've got prostate problems. I can't wait,
sometimes."

(Casey's Bar, in fact, is the other historic hangout downtown,
and has inspired Franklin to seek a historic designation for her
barber shop as a possible way to retain the pole.)

"The new money in town has been really great for the community,"
Peter said, "but like I said, you have to be very careful about
riding into town and messing with tradition."

He's sitting in a barber's chair built in the late 1930s, next
to an electronic hobby horse built before that, under a picture of
popular haircuts from the 1950s.

He's facing that row of antique chairs salvaged from the
historic town school, full of customers long-since retired, and a
couple not yet in school. These guys know a thing or two about
tradition, and what it's worth.

"When we die," Peter announces, "there won't be any common sense
left in the world."

And then conversation swings to politics, to prescription drugs,
to wildfires. They talk about squirrels and pine cones and what
those signals might mean for an early winter. Talk turns to
raspberry patches, to

ex-wives, to daily aches and pains, to the war in Iraq, to the
big box stores crowding out the local marketplace.

"What could they possibly need to buy that they can't get
already?"

"What I want to know is where are they getting their spending
money?"

"I just wonder where they're getting their rent money. I could
use some rent money."

Rent money's a big topic here, where no one is wearing a velour
jogging suit.

"We talk about everything," Franklin said. "It's a place to go
when you need to be around people."

She learned that the hard way a few years back, on Sept. 11. She
was almost to the shop that morning when she heard of the terrorist
attacks on her car radio. (An '84 Land Cruiser with a rusted-out
tailgate, almost as easy to parallel park as a yellow Hummer.)

"Whitefish was like a ghost town," she remembered. "The streets
were absolutely empty. I thought I would just go in and put a note
on the door saying we were closed."

But then the fire chief showed up. Then the judge. Then the
former chief of police. Then the regulars. The place was packed by
9:30 a.m., "and most of these guys all had fresh haircuts
already."

They had come to talk, because at the Clip Joint there's no
appointments, and here you can count on the wait.

"A shop like this really does serve a purpose," Franklin said.
"It's where people go when they really need somebody to talk to.
That day, it was a horrible day to start with, but it turned out to
be a very good day for everyone who came in. We all needed each
other, and we found each other at the shop."

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